Hi. Welcome to another Luminar AI tutorial. I'm
Darlene with Digital Photo Mentor. In this video I'm going to talk about how to add style to
your images using Luminar AI's creative tools. This is day three of my 5-day photo editing
challenge. If you'd like to join me and get access to the raw files so you can follow along,
just sign up using the link in the upper right corner of the video now. Let's get started. Before
I begin please remember to like this video if you enjoy the lesson and subscribe to the channel.
If you have a question about anything in this Luminar AI tutorial please leave it in the comment
area below, and I'll make sure to help you out. The first thing you'll notice is that I've already
done some basic edits in the essential panel. You can tell by the dots next to
the tools that have been applied. This is what the image looked like straight out
of camera, so I've just darkened it and adjusted the white balance and tones a little bit. Now
we're going to move down to the creative panel. So just scroll down the tool bar a little bit.
This is where the magic really starts to happen. The first one is the Sky AI. That's what we're
going to do first. This is the sky replacement tool inside of Luminar AI. The first thing you
need to do is select a new image to put into the sky. So you do that by clicking this little pull
down menu. Now you may not see these here this is my sky replacement pack, I'll tell you a little
bit more about that in a minute. You will see these down the bottom here, so you'll see all of
these blue sky, bright sky, dramatic sky, and so on. Keep in mind that if you're just testing Luminar
you can use those, but if this is something that you're going to be using and doing a lot of moving
forward, you're going to want to start creating your own library of sky images, because everybody
that uses Luminar AI is going to have the same skies in their images which isn't going to look
good. So I've created a sky replacement pack, as I mentioned a minute ago, with 25 high resolution
sky images and you'll get two of those to play with today for this tutorial. If you want more
information about the sky pack just look below the video and I'll provide a link for you. I've
already chosen one of my skies to add into this image one that looks good, and I'll talk a little
bit about how to choose the best guy in a moment. So the first thing I want to point out
is that the program analyzes the sky and tries to figure out how to mask it and blend
it in so that it fits with the existing landscape or whatever else is in your image, and it does a
really good job. Let's take a little bit closer look. So when I zoom in here you can see that the
landscape and the sky are nicely separated. The sky is not coming over into the hills. This is a fairly
straightforward image and a really nice sort of distinct skyline, so it's a fairly easy one.
If you have an image that has lots of things protruding up into the sky, maybe trees, or a person
with lots of hair, or complicated items like that, you may have to adjust some of the other sliders
in this tool. Okay? So I'll just kind of go through a couple of these things to show you what they do.
The second one down horizon position if you move it to the right, you're literally moving the sky up
higher and now you can see sort of where the line is. Sometimes that will be applicable if you just
want the sky to sort of blend from the top down, which brings me to the next thing you want to
adjust is the horizon blending. So it's set as a default to 20, but you can see that it's
it's very obvious here. So if I increase this quite high, you can see that I could probably get
away with using this sky up higher and having it blend nicer. So the blend again is a fade from
the image that you've added to the existing sky. I'm going to leave these at default because
it did a great job just out of the gate. Relight scene, what this one does is it allows you
to adapt the coloring in the image to match the sky. So you notice that as I increase the relight
slider, it becomes more moody just like the sky. So you can choose to increase this or decrease
this to your taste. Sky global. This has to do with if you have original image that has clouds in it,
if you want the new sky to write over them you're going to want to increase the sky global, it has
no effect here because the original sky is is just plain blue. So I'll leave that at default. Close
gaps and sky local are the sliders you're going to want to use if you have things like tree branches
or complicated items where there's little cutouts of the sky that the software missed. So close gaps
increase that one if you've got gaps where the sky didn't fill in properly and see if you can adjust
those. Sky local is similar. So again you have to do a little dance with the different sliders until
you get the optimal results with the images you've chosen. Sky defocus should be fairly obvious. If
you have an image where your sky is far in the background and it's it's blurry you're going to
want to defocus the sky to make it look accurate. Because if your original is blurry and you put
a sharp sky in, it's going to look weird. So leave that one. This next one here, Flip Sky. And I want to
bring this one to your attention particularly with this image. Take a look at the original image and
determine where the sun is coming from. If you look at the chairs and the shadows on the ground in the
foreground, you can see that the shadows are going off to the left which means that the sun is up
to the right. Okay? So the sun is up here over this umbrella. But you'll also notice that in this sky
image that I use to replace it, the light is coming from the left hand side. Okay, so that's a mismatch.
You want to make sure that the direction of light in the sky matches the direction of light in the
image you're putting it into. So I'm going to click this box to flip the sky. Now look what's happened.
Now the light is coming from the right hand side as well as the shadows. So now it's a match. Be
really conscious of that that's a mistake that a lot of beginners make using this tool. You can
also choose to add some atmospheric haze, which will then sort of fade the sky out a little bit
which is common at sunsets. It kind of does a nice job here gives it a little bit softer look. You
can also change the sky temperature to warm it up or make it cooler. In this case the default was
good, and you can also use exposure to lighten or darken the sky. One more thing I want to show you
in regards to matching the sky to the original, so besides the lighting direction you also want
to match the quality of light. What I mean by that is in the original image there's bright sun with
harsh shadows meaning there's a hard light source. So a hard light source would be things like
the direct sun, a direct flash, a flashlight, or a light bulb. So an overcast sky such as
this one, if I choose number 14 in my pack, doesn't match. Do you see the difference? And why
that doesn't make sense. Because in the image there's bright sun so you need to have a light
source or a sky that looks like it has a light source that's the same. I'm just going to undo
that one. The final trick I want to show you with the sky replacement is if you do decide to shoot
your own sky images or to buy some extras, you can add them into a folder so they show up in this
pull down menu like I've done here. When you open the menu go up to the top and choose "Show custom
skies." So it will open the folder where those skies are saved, and you can see that I've got my pack
number one and all of the images that I created in the sky pack are there which match the pull
down menu. So as you buy more additional packs or add your own images, if you put them in subfolders
like this. I'll just add another one burst of drama you can see that now this burst of drama one comes
up as a little category heading. So it's a great way to keep the different types of skies separated
if you end up with a whole bunch. Let's close the Sky AI tool and move on. Something else I'm
going to add to this image is the sun rays tool. This is one that came out a couple of versions
ago in Luminar and at first a lot of people, and myself included, went crazy adding sun rays to
everything. Once again it has to be applicable and appropriate for the image you're adding it to. The
first thing you need to do is just drag the amount slider up and you'll start to see the sun appear.
I do that again at a fairly large or high number so that I can see it, and then I'm going to
move it to the appropriate spot on the image using this button here: "Place Sun Center." So
now you've got this little dot that you can move it across the image and you'll see that it's
actually really smart because when you go behind things like the clouds here for example, it
actually knows that you're behind the clouds. I'll just apply it so you can see it, and it
comes out from behind there. It's pretty clever. So I'm going to actually move it outside of the
image, because in the original the sun is coming from this direction and I want to stay congruent
to that, and make sure that the sun is over on this side here. So I've got the placement. Just accept it.
Then you have a bunch of other settings that you can adjust the look of the rays. When you use the
overall look slider, going to the left gives you a darker moodier appearance, and to the right is
brighter and lighter. So there's more sun coming in. I usually leave this one fairly
neutral and come back to it at the end. "Sun Rays Length" is how long the rays actually go
into the scene. Penetration is similar but you'll see that it sort of adds more of a glow at the
top and overall the sun infiltrates your scene a bit more. So let's leave this the length longer
and then I'm going to adjust the sun radius. So I'll place the sun center back in the
middle so you can see what these are doing again for a moment. Okay, so sun radius,
these are all very similar you can see that it's adjusting the amount of glow when it's at
zero there's absolutely no sun glowing at all. Okay, the glow radius is how far out it's going
so they're similar and they work together, and then the glow amount again similar. So play around
with these, I find that I like to have the sun radius fairly low and then depending on where
the sun is I might have a bit of a glow or not. So I don't really need either of those
because the sun is out of the frame. Next we have number of sun rays so you can
have lots of rays or just a few. Again it's going to depend on what you think is works with
this scene. I find that just playing with the sliders and experimenting until I come up with a
look that I like is the best way to approach it. You can also adjust the sun and the sun rays
warmth I'm going to make the sun rays a little bit warmer so now you can really feel like you're
sitting in that chair and the sun is beating down at sunset right? The randomized slider is my
favorite. So I'll often just click along it or slide it up and down and what it does is it kind
of rotates the rays and you could see how it's changing in the image and I'll just do that until
I get one that fits. So I kind of, what I'm looking for here is I don't want the sun rays to hit
this plant so much. I'm looking for them to come sort of in the middle and you can also mask them
once you get one that you like, so that's not bad. Something like that. Okay lots of flair almost
in that one, and you'll notice that because it's adding this flare, it's reduced the
contrast in this area and not in this area. So it's really realistic as if you had actual
sun flare in your image. So I'm gonna just leave that one like that. So that looks nice. So
what it's adding here I'll just toggle it off, it's exactly what I just described a minute ago almost
like the sun is hitting your lens and giving a bit of sun flare. If you want to mask it you can
mask it and erase it from certain areas like we did in the last video. So if I don't want the flare
happening on this side of the image I can do that and then it just flares a little bit into
the chair. I'm happy with that. Once again do a before and after to see the overall effect.
See how much more dramatic this is with a new sky it's an image that I shot, so it's real, it's
my image both of them, and I've added the sun rays to give that little bit of sun flare which
sometimes you don't get in the camera but you want to create later. To finish this image off
I'm going to use my favorite ending tool the mystical one again, and even in here I could add
more warmth if I want to warm it up even farther. More saturation, but I think I'm just going
to give it a gentle glow, and call it a day. So for this first image I've used the Sky AI the
sun rays and the mystical tool. There's several others in the creative panel I want to show
you so let's dig in on the next image. Just a quick reminder if you're enjoying the video please
remember to like it and subscribe to the channel. This is our next image. Here it is directly out of
camera it was shot on a very foggy, smoggy, rainy, overcast day in Hong Kong, so it's kind of dreary
and blah. And this is what I've created using some of the tools that I'm going to show you next.
Once again I've applied some very basic edits from the essentials panel above, just to adjust
the contrast and brightness a little bit. Moving into the creative tools once again. I'm not going
to do a sky replacement here. I think that the sky is very bland so we're going to do some different
things to make it more interesting instead of replacing it this time. For this one we're going
to use the Augmented Sky AI tool. What that allows you to do is add objects into the sky. Once again
Luminar comes with some pre-loaded ones ready for you to use, and you can add your own custom objects
as well just like the sky replacement images. So for this one I'm going to add some birds, but
just to show you some fun things and to show you that the people at Skylum have a sense of humor,
if you want you can add the space shuttle into your images. You can move it around you can size
it you can make it giant or you can even add a giraffe to your images if you want. There's some
pretty fun and funny things in here like eagle, the giraffe, planets, and space shuttle. Let's work
on something a bit more realistic. I've chosen birds number three and they're really big right
out of the gate, so the first thing I'm gonna do is place them, and that also allows you to resize it,
okay, so you just grab this little bar you can move the birds around, you can make them smaller.
So I want them to appear like they're more sort of flying behind the boat like
about like that you can also rotate it and so on. So maybe even just a little bit smaller.
So I want them to just add something to that empty sky without becoming the focus of the image.
Let's go smaller. There we go. Place object. Once again you can do adjustments like flipping
it if you want them to fly the other way, you can defocus them if they're further in
the background and they need to be blurry, and so on. We have a relight slider again and you
can adjust the amount of the birds appearing, fade them out a little bit. Which in this case is not
a bad idea because then it appears like they're sort of coming out of the fog so that they blend
a little bit more into that sky. So that's the Augmented Sky AI tool. For this challenge I
recommend let's get creative add something that you think is fun, maybe play around with some
fantasy looks and see what you can come up with. Try it on your own images as well. Moving on to the
next tool. I used Atmosphere AI in an earlier video and we're going to use that one again here. So this
one allows you to add things like fog, layered fog, mist, or haze. For this image I've already tested
all of them and determined that I liked mist the best. Now you just need to increase the amount
and you'll see that it gets brighter. You can adjust how white the mist is with the lightness
slider at the bottom, and then the depth slider is really cool because it allows you to bring the
mist forward so look what happens when I bring it forward. It almost is like it's covering the boat
at one point. So now the fog is really socked in the Hong Kong harbor. I'm going to scale it back
just a little bit so it's not covering the boat and it's not quite so bright. About like that.
Anytime you want to see what only one tool is doing remember to use the toggle switch on the
tool on the upper right corner of the toolbar, just to see what that tool is doing, and
then you can decide if it's gone too far and you want to scale it back or you didn't
go far enough. The next tool we're going to look at is dramatic. Dramatic does exactly what it
sounds like it does, it adds drama to your image. So when we drag it all the way up it sort
of adds a desaturated faded look, but pumps up the contrast at the same time. If you want to
maintain the saturation there's a slider for that. Remember if you don't see these bottom panels
just open them with a little up and down arrow. The amount slider controls the strength of the
effect overall. Local contrast has to do with edge contrast, so anywhere there's something dark next
to something light it's going to increase when you drag the slider higher it's going to decrease
that contrast when you drag it lower. So because I want to add drama here I'm going to leave it
quite high. Maybe not quite so much on the amount, and I'll leave the saturation where it was at
default. So once again check what the tool is doing. You can see how it's really punched it out and
brought that boat out of the fog. Next let's move down to mood, looks like a little lotus flower. If
you've used Luminar 4 and are looking for the LUTS, they've now moved them under mood. You can see here
that it still has the LUT feature. LUT stands for "look up table" and it's a fancy way of saying color
grading or color toning. So it allows you to choose again some that are pre set and default in Luminar,
and you can add or purchase your own as well. A LUT is something that's a little more difficult
to make yourself so if you want to get additional ones, you'll notice that there's an option at
the top here to load custom LUTs and that will take you to Skylum's website where you could buy
some of theirs pre-packaged. Once again I've chosen one of these to apply and you'll notice that
they're in categories cross processing, creative, cinematic, and at the bottom portrait toning, so
even though this is not a portrait image I've chosen "Maria". I look for the tones that I want to
have appear in the image and just see which is the most pleasing to me with this particular
image. And Maria was the one that I liked. So I like the idea of having sort of this almost
70's faded color look like the ship is old or the the image is old. So I chose the Maria. Then
you can increase the amount to see it stronger. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll increase the
amount slider to at least 50, then as you're looking through them if you scroll your mouse over
the different LUTs you'll see a preview and it's easier to choose when they're turned up a little
higher because you really see the effect strongly, and just like anything once I apply it, and chosen
the one that I like, then I will turn it down to how I want it to be on the finished image.
The last thing I'm going to do on this image even though it's a creative tool, they've now moved
it and it's not in the creative panel either. So if you're looking for how to add a texture overlay
in Luminar AI follow along. Over on the right below the tool menu there's one now called
local masking. With a little brush icon. When you click that you'll see something that says
local masking. Surprise. And an add button. When you click add there you have the texture overlay.
So it's slightly hidden now but it makes sense where it is and you'll see how it applies just the
same as if it was in the toolbar. If you've never worked with texture overlays there's a few things
to know. Obviously number one you need to load a texture before you can apply it. So just like a sky
replacement you need to have some texture images. I've provided two for you for today's
tutorial so that you can follow along. So click load texture and I have a full set of
40 that are images that I took in Cuba. Cuba is full of textures everywhere I could probably come
up with 200 things that are textured from Cuba. So I've chosen in my set number 19 and you'll get
this one to practice with. So just choose the image. Now right out of the gate you'll see that it
probably doesn't look exactly how we want it, right? So a few things you need to know how to
adjust it. Make sure the advanced settings tab is opened at the bottom, and the biggest thing and the
most important thing to adjust is the blend mode. okay so the way that textures work is imagine you
took a piece of fabric and put it across your face Okay, if it's completely opaque you can't see
through it, and people can't see through it to see you, but if you lower the opacity or you have a
material that is sheer then you can see through it. So that's kind of what's happening here. You'll
see that the opacity is at 50 percent, so if I lower the opacity to zero now we don't see it at
all. If I increase the opacity to 100, now we don't see the image below or behind it at all. So it
defaults you to 50 so that you can see the effect, but you have a few ways of adjusting how it looks
on the image. The biggest one is down here in the advanced settings called the blend mode. Okay, so
blend mode is how does this image or this layer on top apply to the one below. So we're under
normal right now. As you scroll through them you'll see a preview of what it will look like
with that blend mode. So darken any of these in this first section means that anything that's
darker in the texture than the image underneath only those bits will show. So you'll see
that the bits when we look at them normal are that are darker than the original image
like the bottom left corner in the water, that one shows up a lot there as well as most
of the stuff in the sky. But there's not much texture over the boat because the texture is not
darker than the boat. We could play with multiply and color burn. Going to the next section it's the
opposite. Now you'll notice that almost nothing of the texture is showing in the sky because only
the parts of the texture that are lighter than the original image are now showing. Similar with
screen. Overlay looks for a difference in contrast, so often overlay or soft light those are usually
my go-to's when applying a texture because I find that this one works really well. So if you're not
sure start with overlay and go from there. If you go down to the very bottom luminosity is another
one that applies slightly differently and it only applies a difference in terms of brightness, right?
You can then work with the opacity and masking on this one. But I'm going to go with overlay
because right off the bat it gets me the closest to what I'm looking for. Then I can increase
the opacity of the texture a little bit. Okay, I can also increase the contrast of it or
lower the contrast increase the brightness, or if you have an image or a texture that has a lot of
color in it and you don't want the color to show such as that bottom left corner you can just
desaturate it and it only applies to the texture. So what you're desaturating is just the texture
not the underlying image. These little buttons up here right above opacity with these two arrows
going this way or this way means that you can flip the image. Okay, so if I click this watch what
happens. Now it's flipped the image side to side, and if I do the other one it's going to flip
it upside down. So now you can see that dark corner is on the top where it was on the bottom
before and now I fully rotated all the way around. Okay, so you could flip and flop your texture to
see how it looks best on your particular image. I kind of liked the dark spot in the bottom left
corner like the water is sort of stained but you might decide that you like it up here in the sky
and go with that. Lower the opacity a little bit, and I'm just going to do a quick mask and you'll
notice that this texture tool comes with the mask tool already open for you to apply. Because
Luminar AI kind of makes the assumption that you're going to want to remove this texture from certain
areas. So I'm going to remove it from the boat so I'm going to make sure that I'm using the erase
tool which is this one, and I'm going to lower the opacity a little bit, and I'm going to zoom in a
little bit so I can see the boat bigger, and then I'm just going to paint over the boat, and you'll
see what happens. So anywhere that you see red that is the mask. And what that means is where there
is red, this particular effect, in this case the texture screen is applying. Okay, so if I don't want
it on the boat or if I don't want it over the burs or something else you want to erase the red. So
red shows that effect, and getting rid of the red erases that effect. So I'm just going to do that. I
want to make sure that I'm not over spilling into the water because if I do that you start to get
sort of like a halo around the boat, okay, so be conscious of painting in or painting out and if
you make a mistake, just switch to the other brush. You notice that I'm resizing my brush a lot so I
can get into the finer details in the small areas, like so on. So I want to make sure that's covered,
and even like in little areas in here if I was doing this image and being really critical I
would probably zoom in to 100 and take my time. But for the purposes of this demonstration I think
that's good enough. So then to apply it, just close the texture. Let's zoom back out and go back to
the tool panel and you can continue from there. Make note that anytime you're doing editing inside
of Luminar AI these are non-destructive edits and what that means is you can undo them anytime as
I've demonstrated before with the history tool over here on the right the little clock or
you could completely revert to the original or you can update or change any of the
settings that you've already applied. So you're not cooking in any of these things until
you go to make a final export. Once you're happy with the image you can go ahead and export it with
the export tool at the end here and save to disk. Note that if you are using Luminar AI as a plugin
for Lightroom or Photoshop you will not see the export button, you will see an apply button in the
upper right instead, which will then save it as a new image and import it back into your Lightroom
or your Photoshop wherever you started from. One final before and after. So we took something
that was fairly boring maybe even just a snapshot. I took a ride on this boat it was a little
tour of the harbor I just wanted to capture that and make something a little more artistic
and creative. Speaking of creativity, I just want to show you this one for inspiration.This is not
an image you're going to get to work with today. This is one that I shot at an anime festival
in Japan, and I love this character's costume And I wanted to do something really funky with it.
and just by accident by playing with some of the templates inside of Luminar, I was able to find one
that was experimental, hint under the experimental ones, and come up with that, which I absolutely love
and works for this image because it's very fantasy feeling. We have one more image to look at in this
lesson so let's continue. The final image for today is the Bamboo Forest. Take a look at the before
image. I've already done some basic processing, color and contrast adjustments, which we talked
about in the day two video, and I've added the sun rays which you saw earlier. Now I'm going to add
a couple of more creative tools that you haven't seen yet. I could add some color toning with the
mood tool as I did in the last image but we're going to use a different one just to show you
how it works and that is toning. If you've used Luminar 4 or older versions this was called "Split
Toning," so if you're looking for that it's just called toning now. This one allows you to add
a color tint to the highlights and the shadows separately in different color tones. Hence
the term "Split Tone." So I'm going to add some blue tone to the shadows. So you'll notice that
the hue slider is grayed out so you can't change the color until you apply some saturation. So
I usually dial the saturation up high again, and then pick the color that I want. So I know that
I want something up in this blue spectrum because I want the shadows to appear cooler, right? Then
I'm going to drag the saturation down a little bit, click over to the highlights button, once again
saturation, and this time I'm going to choose something in the golden range around 50. Looks good
to me. So then you can adjust the saturation amount as to how much that effect is going to apply
in the highlights. Going back to the shadows you can do the same thing. You also have some other
controls at the top you have the overall amount, so strength once again, and then you have balance
at the bottom. So if you go more to the left you're going towards the shadows meaning
there's going to be more of the blue and less of the yellow. If you go the other direction
you're going to see more of the highlights. So you can decide where you want this to fall.
I think I want to go more towards the golden. I don't want to have a really nice gold sun coming
through there. Let's have a look at the before, and after. So it's just added some more sun
and glow coming through the sky and enhanced what I've done with the sun rays filter. The only
other one I'm going to apply in this image is glow. There's lots of options under the glow tool
similar to mystical but slightly different okay I'm going to look at orton effect in tomorrow's
video when we talk about portrait editing so for today's I'm going to work on glow, but play around
with some of the others and see what they do. To start to apply it drag the amount up as usual
I'm going to go fairly extreme and then dial it back. The difference you'll notice with this
particular one, the glow one, is that it only applies and I'm gonna drag this up higher as well
to the bright areas of your image. You'll notice that there's not a lot of glow happening down here
in the shadows or on the people. Let me toggle that off. You see that most of the glow is coming from
that central area where the sun is. If we look at mystical it does something different it applies
more evenly to the whole image. If I try the soft focus one, you can see that it's doing similar.
And that's obviously too extreme, but you can definitely see that it's applying more in those
bright areas than it is in the dark areas. That's actually not too bad. So it's kind of like there's
just this heavenly glow maybe turn the brightness down or a touch. Now you'll notice down the bottom
there's a template called "Bamboo Sunset #2 edited," so what I did was I created this
image earlier and saved it as a template called "Bamboo Sunset" in a couple of different
versions. If I go back to my color here you'll see I've got another bamboo image, and if I go into
the templates under my collection and My Templates, you can see the two different bamboo templates
that I saved earlier. So "Bamboo Sunset #1" looks like that. So you can see with this image
one click and it's almost done. All I would need to do is move the sun rays to a more applicable
location. Let's try "Bamboo Sunset #2." Slightly different, also good, and I
think I could just move the sun rays. Once again move the sun rays, see it's
flying behind here let's put it over here, and create sort of this glow coming
across this this valley here. So one click and moving the sun and I've got a finished image.
So that was just to reiterate again the power of the templates make sure that if you've created
something that you like the look of save it as a template. Save as many variations as you want.
Move the sun rays around give it more of a glow, give it less of a glow, and have a series of Bamboo
Forest templates that you can then apply on your images. So your goal for this lesson today is to
get creative. Make sure you watch my next Luminar AI tutorial all about the Portrait AI tools and
portrait editing. Just click here. If you want to go back to the beginning and start the challenge
on day one just click the video on the left. Thanks for watching, please remember to like this video
subscribe to my channel and share it with friends.
